MONEY MONSTER Review: This Movie Feels Bernt

If you’ve ever shared a Facebook meme about how bad Wall Street or “the bankers” are without really understanding any of the issues underlying the problems in our global economy, boy do I have the movie for you.

If you’ve ever felt that Dog Day Afternoon was maybe too well-written and tense and perhaps featured too many characters who have unique and exciting personalities, boy do I have the movie for you.

If you’re lamenting the lack of mid-budget glossy Hollywood movies where big movie stars engage in the pantomime of tackling an important issue without actually saying anything about the issue - or humanity or life or much of anything at all - holy shit, do I have the movie for you.

You know that Money Monster is a bad film very early, when a montage of TV financial news anchors tell us about a Wall Street meltdown caused by a ‘glitch’ in an automatic trading algorithm and director Jodie Foster repeats and distorts and scratches the word ‘glitch’ like she’s remixing a Ministry song from 1994. In fact the whole movie has the retro feel of a 90s studio film, a time when formulaic and uninspired scripts were being propped up on the backs of movie stars who were discovering movie stardom no longer shone as brightly as it had in decades past. It’s a 70s film with the edges sanded off, with the cinematography too clean and with its sense of rebellion stifled under the massive paychecks of its stars and director.

George Clooney is the Money Monster, Lee Gates. He hosts a TV show where he gives stock advice using theatrics and extreme hyperbole; it’s indicated early in the film that he’s buddy-buddy with the companies whose stock he praises or trashes. The latest episode of Money Monster starts as normal, with Gates buffooning it up in a shuck and jive hip hop dance (the movie approaches topics of race but always manages to avoid really confronting them), but soon shit goes off the rails. English actor Jack O’Connell enters the studio; he’s Kyle Budwell, a working stiff from Queens (whose accent is from a fever dream version of On The Waterfront) who lost 60k when one of Gates’ stock tips went tits up. Kyle has a gun and a bomb vest, and he takes Gates hostage. In the control room is Julia Roberts as Patty Fenn, the director of the show, who is trying to keep everybody alive while sharing no screen time with any of the other actors. By the way, Patty is about to quit the show and get a job at another network because working with Gates is such a pain and the show is such a joke. I’ll let you do the math on how that storyline plays out in this movie star driven film.

Kyle wants to address the nation on Money Monster, but the movie never gives him anything to say. Every time he’s at a place where he might give some sort of speech - some sort of Howard Beale in Network moment of utter clarity and truth - the film cuts away to the machinations of the NYPD as they attempt to defuse the hostage crisis. It’s like the film was written by someone who wondered why more of Dog Day Afternoon wasn’t spent with Charles Durning’s cop.

Kyle inability to articulate his beef - beyond the same ‘it ain’t fair!’ complaint that motivates millions to push the share button Facebook memes they don’t actually look into - is the film’s central failing. We know it ain’t fair. It’s clear it ain’t fair. A movie like Money Monster needs to do what a movie like The Big Short did - show us HOW it ain’t fair. Explain to us the tricks of the trade that allow the Wall Street jackoffs to fuck us rotten all the time. Instead of giving us insight into the world of finance, Money Monster treats it like the elements of a 90s tech thriller, with people talking about ‘quants’ and ‘algos’ and the big villain - a greedy CEO - jet setting around the world to personally bribe heroic African labor leaders. It all feels generic and more than a little phony, and it offers little to no insight into how this stuff works on a day-to-day level. The very fact that the film’s premise comes from a monumental meltdown - 800 million lost from one investment company in a handful of minutes - actually dulls the movie’s point. This is a simple case of criminal behavior, a one bad apple scenario. The movie fully indicts one company, one man (both fictional) while ignoring the banal perfidy that permeates the floor of the Stock Exchange and the coke-dusted offices of the traders and executives.

That’s the film’s main failing. The film’s other failing is that it never settles the hostage crisis down to a place where Kyle and Gates can really just talk. It’s all maneuvers and bluffs, time being wasted so the cops can get into position. One of the great aspects of Dog Day Afternoon is the way Stockholm Syndrome gently and realistically sets in at the bank; while Money Monster makes a stab at that concept (while the trailers promise a paranoid thriller third act it’s actually just Gates wanting to help Kyle get the ‘truth’) it doesn’t execute it in a believable way.

There are two aspects of the film at fault here: the script is thin as hell, setting aside any interesting character work in favor of cheap reveals (you won’t believe what Kyle’s girlfriend has to say about him! LOL!), and Jodie Foster has no facility for tension. If the movie isn’t going to spend its lengthy, interminable second act as a character piece filled with philosophical and ideological debates it needs to operate as a tense thriller, and it doesn’t. All of the moments of tension - the cops quietly and secretly evacuating the studio, Kyle and Gates having numerous stand-offs - play as limp as Gates’ producer’s dick before he puts on erectile cream (yes, this is a plot point in the film but it has no actual payoff, a symptom of the movie’s bad script). There’s simply zero energy in these scenes, and none of the actors bring the electricity needed to shock this stuff to life, to make it pop off the screen.

George Clooney is fine, although he seems incapable of playing the scenes where Gates is terrified and has no control; he’s almost mugging with his portrayal of fear. He might as well be knocking his knees together. Roberts is fine as well, even though most of her scenes are tight shots while she speaks into a mic (I do not believe she shares the screen with Jack O’Connell even once, and she has only a handful of moments together with Clooney). She has a calm authority that works in the role, but like every other part it’s fairly underwritten.

Jack O’Connell… look, I like Jack O’Connell. I think he’s one of the more exciting young actors today. And he definitely brings an intensity to his role that his co-stars do not have. But there’s a thudding one-note aspect to his character that comes from the script, and it leaves him hobbled. He’s just mad, he’s just blustery and yelling, and it isn’t until the very end of the movie that we get to see another side of him. The script makes the weird decision to make the working class guy - the victim of the Wall Street crooks for whom Gates acts as court jester - flat and empty, driven only by an incoherent rage and a childlike demand. He just wants to hear someone say what they do on Wall Street is wrong, and the movie never considers that getting that sort of confession through the use of a bomb vest is kinda pointless.

Money Monster is soggy and dull, a movie that seems to be of the current “Feel the Bern” moment but that has nothing to say about our economy or the people who pull its strings. It isn’t even smart enough to feel like a preaching to the choir movie; it’s just taking the exact sort of vaguely anti-banking sentiments that fueled films like It’s A Wonderful Life decades ago and fusing them with weak complaints about how the corporations own the airwaves. Instead of suffering through this movie watch Dog Day Afternoon, Network and The Big Short - sure it’ll be an experience that lasts three times as long, but those three films will feel half the length of this plodding bore. They'll leave you with a fire in your belly Money Monster cannot hope to kindle.